


Eudaimonia

by mildlyobsessive



Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: Gen, Modern Era, Recovery, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 22:10:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13040466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mildlyobsessive/pseuds/mildlyobsessive
Summary: This was never going to be easy. He was a fool to think that it could be.





	Eudaimonia

_This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.  
-King Lear (Act 3, Scene 4, Page 4)_

The forest is cold, the icy frost of the ground seaping through the fabric of Moritz's pants. The wind stings against his cheeks, knocking the breath out of him like a long fall, and Moritz burrows a little deeper into his jacket. The tips of his fingers are purplish and numb.

His teeth chatter and everything aches, but he’s pretty used to the latter, so. 

He fishes the gun out of his coat pocket and fidgets with it for a moment, watching the way the chill moonlight dances on the metal. He feels like a worshipper at some kind of alter when he feels himself fall onto his knees, as if the gun is his savior. In a way, Moritz supposes it is. 

Eventually the cool metal makes its way to the side of his head, teasing its way to his mouth. The freezing surface of it feels nice against Moritz’s chapped lips, and it’s comforting. 

And maybe this is just the way things were always supposed to turn out. Maybe fate isn't bullshit, maybe the universe isn't random and pointless and opaque, maybe every breath he took had already been mapped to exhaustion by some omnipotent _thing_. Maybe he was always destined to end up here, crumbling and alone. Maybe he always knew that this was what it would come to. 

Maybe.

It's not like it makes any fucking difference anymore. 

Whatever's true, whatever's sensical, Moritz is here _now_ , at this particular moment in all of time and space, posing like a prehistoric insect encased in amber. Here, with a gun in his hand and the ghost of his father's hand caressing his cheek, so much softer then it had been just hours earlier. So much gentler than anything he was ever likely to receive. And that's okay, really, because part of Moritz has always known what he was, and now it's just time to own up to it. Time to take responsibility. This is a service, really, a gift, to his parents, to his teachers, to Melchior and Ilse and Ernst and Thea and everyone he's ever managed to screw up. He's a problem; an idiot, a dunce, a crippled animal shattered on the side of the road by a car's wheels. He's putting himself down. It's a kindness, really, a merciful act.

After all, what's the point of letting the poor beast go on suffering? Go on wrecking himself and everyone unlucky enough to know him, playing the part of the proverbial bull in a china shop. If the bull had just realized what he was, he could have saved everyone a whole lot of trouble just by not going into that damned china shop in the first place.

Mortiz is a bull, and he's been stumbling through this china shop for so very long. He's shattered everything he's managed to touch. And so he's doing the logical thing here, really. Finding an emergency exit. Vacating the premises. Saving this poor allegorical china shop from bankruptcy in the process.

Maybe this line of thinking doesn't make sense. Maybe he doesn't really give much of a shit anymore either way. 

What does make sense is the solid metal in his hand, precise and smooth in its lethality. It's his father's. He hid it in his closet, and Moritz would like to pretend that he hasn't been keeping an eye on it for the last few months. Moritz would like to pretend that this is a spur of the moment decision. 

His phone rings and he jumps, his finger twitching on the trigger. It's an unwanted disruption of a climatic moment, and Moritz can't help but feel annoyed as he digs into his pocket for his cell, gun dangling loosely from his left hand. 

It's Melchior. 

Moritz's hand most definitely is not shaking when he hits "accept.”

"Have you done the trig homework yet?" Melchi is blunt, to the point, they way he's always been. Always the one to say what everyone else is thinking, always the one to show off without trying to. If there's anything left of him to miss with, Moritz thinks he'll miss him very much.

"No, sorry." Short, curt, unemotional. Get this over with and go, go, go.

“Damn it. I’m stuck on number ten.”

So he’s going to talk then. Moritz attempts to gather whatever’s left of himself together again, like sweeping dirt into a dustpan. He can do this. He has to. “And you thought I would have the answer?” It’s supposed to be a joke, but it comes out cold.

“Yeah? I mean, why not?”

Moritz can’t answer that, because then this conversation will spiral into a torrent of _because I’m stupid and worthless and standing in the woods with a gun and what you’d probably consider a bad idea. And you’re a genius and going somewhere in life and you make me hate myself without even meaning to, but that’s not your fault, really_. 

“Moritz?”

“Yeah?” He chokes on the word and suddenly realizes that his tongue is like sandpaper.

“Is everything okay? You sound weird.”

He doesn’t mean to say, it really, but it happens. “Um . . . not really?”

“What happened?” Melchior’s voice is urgent, concerned, and it reminds Moritz of when they were kids and the older boys used to push him on the playground. Melchior always used to keep on eye on him, pull him back on to his feet when he landed a little too hard on the blacktop, kick the perpetrators in the shins whenever they got too close. Melchi, as disconnected and even cruel as he sometimes seemed to others, always cared. Even when it would be so much easier for Moritz if he didn’t. 

“Nothing, really.” His voice is so, so flat, like he’s dead already. He strains, but he can’t make himself sound convincing.

“Don’t lie.” He always knows, doesn’t he?

“I, um, I got my tests scores back.” But that’s not what this is about, not really anyway. The bright red F glaring at him like a scarlet letter from the top of his results may have pushed him, but Moritz’s been on this cliff so long that he doesn’t know any other home. He’s set up camp here, built a tent and started a campfire, but the edge has been seeming more enticing than his sleeping bag for years now. He’s been taunting gravity for longer than he would like to admit.

“Bad?” Moritz convinces himself that there’s condemnation in Melchior’s voice, just to make this easier. 

He breathes. Once. Twice. Blinks. “Yeah.”

“How bad, Moritz?” There’s an edge of fear now. Whether it’s fear for himself or Moritz he can’t make out.

“I failed,” he says, and then it’s too quiet, so he laughs to fill the silence. It just sounds sad, but he guesses that’s fitting, considering the circumstances.

It’s quiet long enough that Moritz starts to listen to the wind blowing through the trees around him, starts fiddling with the gun again. His finger dances on the trigger like it’s teasing him. His hand won’t stop shaking.

“Okay. Okay, well . . .” Melchi says, finally, and it’s so unusual for him to not have the right words. “It’s going to be fine, Moritz. We’ll take care of it, I promise.” He seems to overcome his awe, here, and his tone morphs seamlessly back into classic Melchior, commanding and logical. Classic Melchior, who Moritz always thought could fix anything. “We can go talk to the dean tomorrow and ask him about retakes. That’s a long shot, yeah, but there’s always summer classes, Moritz. I can take them too, I’ve been thinking about doing some extra studying over break anyway. It’ll work out. Really.”

Moritz thinks he’s crying, but his cheeks have long since gone numb from the wind and his father’s anger, so he can’t really tell. He can hear something though, these ragged little hitching noises that he realizes are coming from him. All he wanted to do was make this easy. All he wants to do is _go_. But now there’s Melchior, smart Melchior, caring-in-his-weird-ass-distant-way Melchior, and nothing’s easy anymore. Because he makes it seem so simple, fixing it, as if Moritz isn’t a seeping wound that’s already infected. As if Moritz isn’t the problem, but rather a victim of it. He doesn’t think he has the strength or the energy to walk home, let alone fix this mess he’s made for himself.

But when Melchi says it with such self-assuredness, in that tone of his when intellectual superiority nearly drips from each syllable, it’s so hard not to believe him. To refuse to let Melchior trick him into trying again, and then again, and then another time after that, as he’s done so many times before. Moritz has nothing left in him to try with, and he’s trying to be nonchalant about that, but the realization has been a difficult one, to say the least. He’s _done_. He has no other choice but to throw in the towel. There’s so little of him still clinging on that he doesn’t even really consider it as dying. Just finishing off something that was already halfway there.

“Moritz?” And Melchi’s voice is gently nervous once again. “Where are you?”

“Home?” he tries, but he can’t force any inflection into his voice, as much as he tries. He sounds robotic, like Siri on his phone when he asks her productive and reasonable questions like _how long does it take to die from (insert various method here)_ or _I can’t feel literally anything anymore????_

“You’re lying again.”

“Nowhere, okay? It doesn’t matter.”

There’s panic in Melchi’s voice when he quietly says “I’m starting to think it does,” but Moritz stares at the gun still pinched in his left hand and very deliberately does not think about that. 

“I’m just taking a walk, Melchi, Jesus,”

“Please tell me where you are? You’re kind of freaking me out, dude.” And there’s that sliver of fear again, growing until it encompasses Moritz entirely. He screws his eyes shut, tries to block out the trees under which they used to play for hours, to block out Melchior and everything he’s done and would do for him. This was never going to be easy. He was a fool to think it could be.

“Bye, Melchi,” he says, and this time his voice cracks instead of coming out monotone. 

“Moritz, wait, please-“ Melchior stutters out, but Moritz knows that if he lets him finish he’ll end up walking back home tonight. He’ll put his dad’s gun back into his closet and go to bed and end up here again next month. He doesn’t think he can handle that. Doesn’t feel capable of functioning for that long.

“You’re my best friend,” he says instead, cutting Melchior off. “You know that, right? I’m really lucky to have you.” 

And then he hits the “end call” button, Melchi still frantically objecting as the line disconnects. His hand, shaking, tries to put his phone back in his coat pocket, but it slips and falls screen-down into the snow. Moritz doesn’t try and recover it. 

He stares at the trees around him and he can almost see the younger version of himself laughing and playing pirates. He almost feels like he owes him an apology, like, _sorry that you’ll never accomplish anything, kid. Sorry that you’re going to die alone in the freezing woods. I didn’t want it to turn out like this, promise._ Then he thinks he might owe his father an apology, too, for being a terrible son, and his classmates for being so uncomfortable and hard to talk to. And to Melchior, for being a burden and making him worry. 

Moritz has fucked so much up that he can’t possible atone for it. 

He gets a better grip on the gun and falls to his knees again, hearing the dull, bitter crunch of the snow under his weight. And then he looks at the dark sky and thinks of stars and angels and Melchior, and then the gun’s in his mouth.

His finger tenses on the trigger before suddenly something warm and solid runs into him and all Moritz tastes is snow. He sits up, scrambling for the gun that he’s lost somewhere in the drift, but there’s Melchior, grabbing at the weapon and pulling it away from him with panicky determination. 

“Give it to me,” Moritz exhales, ragged and exhausted, but Melchi won’t, so he says it again, louder this time. “Give it to me!”

“No,” Melchior rasps as he finally manages to grab and pocket the gun. “No, no, no,” He sounds like he might be having a panic attack, and there’s another reason why everything would be so much better if Moritz wasn’t here.

“Please,” Moritz says, but it’s quieter this time, sadder, somehow, and he sits back in the snow, shivering. “Please give it back.”

Melchior just looks at him, eyes wide and horrified.

“Did you not hear me?” He asks, and he’s suddenly angry. “Fucking _give it to me_. I - I can’t - please, I can’t do this - I need it, please,” he stammers, and now he’s crying again. Why the fuck can’t he decide what he’s feeling? Why do his emotions decide to kickstart _now_ , after months of languishing in inactivity? “I can’t do this anymore, Melchi, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, _please_.” 

Melchior’s arms are suddenly around him, and it’s so nice that Moritz doesn’t even think to reach for the gun. He buries himself into Melchi’s chest like it’s a grave and sobs, curling in on himself. He feels like a child, vulnerable and pathetic, unable to do anything. The snow has long since soaked through the knees of his jeans and left him cold and damp. He opens his mouth to speak, but all that will come out is that disgusting hitching noise, and Moritz realizes that he didn’t plan on having to explain all this to anyone.

When Melchior gently pulls him to his feet and steers him out of the forest, Moritz doesn’t say anything. 

When he throws the gun into the creek that cuts through the forest and watches it disappear under the ice, Moritz doesn’t say anything 

When Melchi takes him to his house instead of Moritz’s, Moritz just waits until he unlocks the door and follows him inside silently.

He brushes his teeth with Melchior’s toothbrush, changes into a pair of Melchior’s pajamas straight out of the dryer, and gets into Melchior’s bed, all without saying a word.

When Melchior reaches to turn off the light Moritz kind of stutters out, “my phone,” on an impulse, because he just realized that he’s going to need that for the tomorrow he didn’t plan on being there for. But Melchior just produces it from God-knows-where, already in a container of rice to try and salvage it, so he shuts up again and sleeps.

He wakes up once in the middle of the night and pretends he can’t feel Melchi next to him, very much awake and choking on these sad little sobs.


End file.
